2019 LINEUP

The Vaselines

Charlotte Cardin

Human connection is at the heart of Charlotte Cardin’s soulful, evocative songs. The singer draws inspiration from everything around her, but it’s usually the people in her life who urge her songs forth. Whether she&#39;s affected by a stranger or someone she knows, Charlotte centers her lyrics on relationships and the emotions they generate. She’s interested in uncovering how we connect and relate to one another, and each track resonates with palpable, human feeling.

Fast becoming known as a uniquely compelling live performer, Cardin has toured nearly non-stop over the past year, including a major US tour alongside Nick Murphy, sold out run supporting BØRNS and countless Canadian live dates (both as headliner and support). She has also given show-stealing performances at an array of North American festivals including Bonnaroo, Osheaga, and Le Festival d’Été de Québec, the latter of which saw her as special guest to Sting and Peter Gabriel.

Cardin first broke through with her 2016 Canadian EP Big Boy. The release proved a phenomenon with tracks “Like It Doesn’t Hurt” (feat. Husser) and “Dirty Dirty” quickly gaining critical acclaim the US. Interview hailed “the smoky, jazz-tinged alto’S vocal sophistication and adept wordplay” while NOISEY praised her “remarkable control and maturity” and Pigeons & Planes raved “she’s got a voice that’ll make you stop whatever you’re doing, and listen.” Released a year later, Cardin’s major label and US debut EP Main Girl (Atlantic Records) is highlighted by the breakthrough single/title track, and joined by many standouts.

Tei Shi

Born Valerie Teicher, Tei Shi remembers composing songs as early as eight years old - sometimes in a diary, other times recording herself on tapes (some of which are featured on the album) - setting down phrases or melodies as they came to her. Born in Buenos Aires and growing up between (Bogota,) Colombia and (Vancouver,) Canada, she began dreaming of herself as a singer, a performer and an artist. Perhaps symbolic of this newfound determination, around the same time, she struggled with an extreme fear of the night and entered a period of insomnia. To combat this new fear of the dark and unknown she forced herself to hide inside her family home's crawlspace for a minute each night, in order to confront her fear. This crawl space became a sort of symbol for her at this formative phase of her life.

Teicher treated her musical aspirations the same way for some time - comforting and important, but still secret, still too personal to really show the world. "For the first year or two, I was testing the waters," she says. "I wanted to be in the background a bit, to put the music out there and have it be more of an abstract thing. All of the earlier artwork was a little more ethereal, too; it didn't have me on it." Even as she began to study and release music, this instinct to hide kept a hold on her.

With each new song and performance, however, successes and encouragement began to pile up and while at the beginning Tei Shi flourished in a collaborative and peer-based environment she realized over time she needed to to reclaim her own singular creative space. "I started to realize I didn't have a clear sense of myself as an artist independent from the people I was surrounded by," she says. Ultimately it took the end of a relationship that had begun around the inception of herself as Tei Shi to spearhead her own musical development. "That relationship was not only a huge part of my life, it was an integral part of the identity I had formed around Tei Shi," she explains. "It had spanned my whole experience as Tei Shi and had been very interwoven with it."

"Earlier in my career, I hid because I wanted first and foremost to be seen as a creative person making music. I thought that if I presented myself as a singer people wouldn't get that I write, that I produce too. "People have this idea that you can only check some of the proverbial boxes as a creative woman, that you can't be attractive and sexual and a great singer and a solid performer and a great writer and be in control of your creative space, as if some of those are mutually exclusive for a human woman. My ambition is to represent all of those without having to sacrifice one for the other.

Fiver

Back by popular demand

Fiver with the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition

featuring Bianca Palmer, Jeremy Costello & Nick Dourado

For a decade, Simone Schmidt has been writing new life into and around folk, country, and rock songs. Schmidt has worked under several aliases, fronting country act One Hundred Dollars, psych rock unit The Highest Order and solo project Fiver. In September 2018, Schmidt began collaborating with Maritimes based musicians Bianca Palmer, Jeremy Costello (of cult favourite Special Costello) and Nick "Siq" Dourado (Budiband, Aquakultre). This combination of musicians promises much more in the distant future. All relatively new material.

Too Attached

TOO ATTACHED is two siblings: Vivek Shraya & Shamik Bilgi. VIVEK is a multidisciplinary artist whose album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part-Time Woman, was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. SHAMIK is a producer and beatboxer who has performed in 15 countries and toured with Method Man & Redman, Bassnectar, and Tanya Tagaq.

Too Attached grew out of Vivek and Shamik’s childhood history of singing devotional songs together in Edmonton, obsessing over pop and r&b as teenagers, and informal collaborations throughout their individual decade-long artistic careers. In 2015, they released their first EP, BRONZE, and toured across Canada while opening for Tegan and Sara.

Most recently, Too Attached were listed as one of IN Magazine’s 2018 Canadian Artists To Watch and their newest album, ANGRY, was described by CBC as one of “Canada’s most incisive, radical and galvanizing albums.”

Nice Hands

Nice Hands is a collaboration between producer New Chance and dancer/poet Prices Easy (Aisha Sasha John). Their sound is thumping serenity and syllabic hypnosis: an underwater, bass-heavy, polyvocal rhythmic dream.

Now and then, Dorothea is joined on stage by a shifting cast of admired collaborators including Paul Saulnier, Liam Cole, and incredible singers Isla Craig, Robin Dann and Felicity Williams. She lives in Toronto and is working on recording her debut album while also having a blast singing backup for friends like Jennifer Castle and U.S. Girls.

The Vaselines formed in Glasgow in 1987 and released two singles and one album, Dum Dum, on Scotland’s legendary 53rd & 3rd label. Their music was a playful, sex-obsessed, and totally catchy amalgam of bubblegum and the Velvet Underground that would help form the blueprint for modern indie-pop. The Vaselines broke up in 1989 — the same week Dum Dum was released — but soon Kurt Cobain began literally singing their praises: not only did he plug them in interviews, calling Eugene and Frances his “favorite songwriters in the whole world,” but Nirvana covered three Vaselines songs, igniting world-wide interest in this obscure, defunct and absolutely brilliant band. In 1992, Sub Pop released the compilation The Way of the Vaselines, introducing the band to a new generation of fans. Eugene and Frances were still making music: Eugene formed Captain America, aka Eugenius, and signed with Atlantic Records; Frances led the bands Painkillers and Suckle.

The two stayed in touch and even played together now and then, reuniting in 2008 and touring the U.S. — including a legendary appearance at Sub Pop’s 20th anniversary festival — as well as Brazil, Japan and the UK to adoring audiences beguiled by the band’s irresistible tunes and hilariously salty stage banter. Soon, there was the acclaimed Sex with an X (2010) — unmistakably the Vaselines but with a more sophisticated sound and a newfound poignancy and wisdom.

Above all, V for Vaselines is a celebration of the continued chemistry of Eugene and Frances. “We just work together well,” Eugene says. “I don’t know what it is but when we get together, it creates a sound we couldn’t do separately.”

They were struggling for an album title until one day Eugene came across a classic photo of Winston Churchill flashing the V-for-victory sign. “And I just thought, ‘V for Vaselines!’” he says. Frances loved it too, so that was it. And the album is indeed a sort of victory. “We were wondering if we could do something new and different for us, so we decided to see if we could,” says Eugene. “We’re really happy that we’ve made a record that we can be proud of.”

The Weather Station

The Weather Station is the fourth—and most forthright—album by The Weather Station, the project of Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman. Her most fully realized statement to date, it is a work of profound urgency, artistic generosity, and joy. Self-titled and self-produced, the album unearths a vital new energy from Lindeman’s acclaimed songwriting practice, marrying it to a bold new sense of confidence.

“I wanted to make a rock and roll record,” Lindeman explains, “but one that sounded how I wanted it to sound, which of course is nothing like rock and roll.” The result is a spirited, frequently topical tour de force that declares its understated feminist politics, and its ambitious new sonic directions, from its first moments. On past records, Lindeman has been a master of economy. Here her precisely detailed prose- poem narratives remain as exquisitely wrought as ever, but they inhabit an idiosyncratic, sometimes disorderly, and often daring album that feels, and reads, like a collection of obliquely gut-punching short stories.

Her previous album Loyalty was recorded at La Frette Studios in France in the winter of 2014 with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist). Nominated for the 2015 Polaris Music Prize, it earned praise from The Guardian, Pitchfork, NPR Music, Uncut, and MOJO, among many others, who celebrated its delicate, carefully worded verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, complex metaphors, and rich details of the everyday.

Lindeman and her band have toured extensively in North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, both as a headliner and as support for artists such as The War on Drugs, The Mountain Goats, Damien Jurado, Bahamas, and Basia Bulat.

Han Han

HanHan is a Filipina-Canadian artist and operating room nurse. At the hospital, she saves lives. Onstage, she inspires audiences. Her kinetic, high-energy performances offer unique perspectives. Her songs grapple with social issues and her experiences as a woman and an immigrant.

HanHan can broadly be described as an emcee, using rap and spoken word techniques to deliver her vocals. Her approach is melodic, and she chooses to sing almost exclusively in Filipino languages — Tagalog and Cebuano — rather than shoehorning her ideas into translation in order to cater to English-speaking audiences. Her songs combine contemporary, 808-hip-hop beats with traditional Filipino rhythms and cadences, yielding fresh sounds that tend to spur dancing wherever they’re heard.

After immigrating to Toronto in 2006, she took part in an ongoing poetry workshop. This experience organically drew her into the city’s music and arts communities, as she joined collectives and performed at local events. In 2014, she self-released her debut album, Han Han, which was praised by NOW Magazine, the Huffington Post, and the CBC. Single ‘World Gong Crazy’ was nominated for "Best Song" in Berlin Music Video Awards 2017. The record also led to a publishing deal with EMI, high-quality film / television placements, and international radio play in Germany, France, and the Philippines. She is releasing her sophomore album, URDUJA, in the Fall of 2019.

Riit

From the land that never melts comes a sound that radiates life, youth and promise. Riit, from majestic Panniqtuq, Nunavut, is a new artist making space for herself in the electropop world with Inuktitut lyrics and deep rhythmic vocals layered over gemological synth cuts and sticky, staticky electronic textures. Riit’s music emerges from very distinct circumstances of place, language and experience.

Throughout her debut full-length album, produced by Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck) and recorded in Iqaluit, Nunavut and Toronto, Riit sings about the clarity of forgiveness, the imprint of the past on the present, and personal disconnection. In Inuktitut, Riit’s songs explore family, life and love. Riit also nods to Nunavut’s rich yet underappreciated legacy of songwriters, with covers of Inuititut classics included on the record.

The monoamine-fueled flush of “Qaumajuapik,” the first song shared from her forthcoming debut full-length album, expresses how intense attraction messes with your sense of time, where a single blink contains a universe. Heart races, clock stops. Produced by Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck), the song sweeps in on a buzzy gust before the Tangerine Dream-esque modulations kick in. Teardrop bleeps fall over Riit’s clear voice like a sunshower (the song title means ‘you are shining’).

On the strength of a 3-song EP released in 2017 by Aakuluk Music, Nunavut’s first record label, Riit was nominated for Best Radio Single (Indigenous Music Awards) and Indigenous Artist of the Year (Western Canadian Music Awards). The host of a groundbreaking Inuttitut-language children’s show, Anaana’s Tent, and soon-to-be recipient of an Emerging Talent Award of Excellence for her broadcast work, Riit is one of the faces of a Nunavut youth movement, a group of remarkable, driven and increasingly high-profile individuals who are creating mainstream waves through art. For an artist who has performed only a handful of shows, a performance in London for The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Harry & Meghan) and a sold out show in Paris are highlights of a young career.

Now signed to Six Shooter Records, Riit will release her debut full-length album in 2019.

TRP.P

TRP.P (pronounced "trippy") is a Toronto band breaking barriers on the Hip-Hop/R&B scene. Composed of Truss (producer, singer/songwriter) and Phoenix Pagliacci (singer/songwriter), the dynamic duo began their collective artistry in the summer of 2017. In October of the same year, they released their self-titled debut EP. Since then, they have been unstoppable.

TRP.P has made their mark in Toronto as a group to know. In 2018, NOW Magazine listed them among the list of Must See acts performing at Toronto Pride. Dubbing themselves “The Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth of R&B”, Truss and Phoenix have an undeniable chemistry that is both relatable and infectious. The two have performed across North America, opening for heavy hitters like Oakland songstress Kehlani and Baltimore soulbird Mumu Fresh. Their new EP, 2TRP.P, is set for release in September 2019.

Amaka Queenette

Amaka Queenette is a 20 year old Nigerian-born artist stationed in Toronto. Her genre bending style allows for a full range of musical experiences and no lack of imaginative creativity. With lyrics that feel unrushed and thoughtful, as well as textures that invoke feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality, Amaka intends to remind you of moments that meant everything.

VISUAL ARTISTS

Camille Jodoin-Eng

INSTALLATION ARTIST

Camille Jodoin-Eng (b.1991) is an artist based in Toronto. Her work is an experiment in intuitive language, a meditation of interplay between physical and psychological space. Jodoin-Eng has developed a studio practice that involves drawing, sculpture, fabrication, installation and a growing visual language of personal symbols that reveal the intuitive, emotional, and indefinite.

Select exhibitions include The Gate (Project Gallery), Wires webs veins nerves roots stems (8-11 Gallery), Trident (Little Sister Gallery), and Plaza (The Gladstone Art Hut). Her work has recently been featured by CBC, as well as Vice. Jodoin-Eng is currently represented by Patel Gallery.

Vanessa Rieger

LIVE VISUALS

Born and raised downtown Toronto, Vanessa Rieger graduated from OCADU in 2009 with a degree in Drawing and Painting. Combining skills in fine art, wood working, set design, analog video and performance, they developed a multidisciplinary art practice that gives audiences an immersed A/V experience. Some of her creative inspirations include haunted houses, sci-fi movies, practical special effects, VHS and cyber punk. Rieger currently works as a gallery technician and art installer for various galleries in Ontario, and now lives and has a workshop studio located in Prince Edward County.

blackpowerbarbie

LIVE VISUALS

blackpowerbarbie is an illustrator and animator from Toronto, currently based in New York. Her work spans from editorial illustration to music videos and animated installations. Regardless of the project blackpowerbarbie focuses her work on lovingly representing the emotional vulnerability, complexity, joy and beauty of black women and other women of colour.

Chanteclair

LIVE VISUALS

Chanteclair (née Katie Kotler) is a Toronto-based artist who grew up in Montreal. Her practice explores the physicality of animation, as translated into installation art. She makes connections between different lineages of art history, which seem to meld in unnoticed ways. Kotler uses lo-fi materials to create immersive and self-reflexive atmospheres.